For at least 70 years scientists, researchers and lay people have been comparing the brain to the computer (actually, I remember that when I was young, taking the very first course on computers in high school, the computer was called “cervello elettronico”, Electronic Brain in Italian). The pursue of an …
Read More »Give me more storage, ’cause I need more storage
It is almost 35 years since the introduction of the MacIntosh Hard Drive 20 (September 17, 1985) of which I became a proud owner, bragging with my friends and colleague of its huge capacity, 20MB. Now I could buy a 20 TB hard drive, at about the same price I …
Read More »Platforms, present and future IX
6. Device/product platforms: I stated in the first post in this series that a technical platform support processing, storage and communications. Now, let’s look at a smartphone. Doesn’t it support processing, storage and communications? Of course it does (and it does much more, like sensing). We often underestimate the power of …
Read More »Will digital storage ever be enough?
There should be a point where capacity growth will exceed demand, shouldn’t it? It might, but so far it hasn’t been the case. My first compact flash storage was a huge 32MB, I won’t be able to squeeze a single photo I am taking today with my DSRL camera (an …
Read More »A future proof solution? Look back 3.8 billion years
When I started working, back in 1971, magnetic tapes where seen as a magic form of data storage. One could store an unbelievable 1.1 MB of data! At that time the alternative was storing data on paper tapes… This very old technology (in Moore’s clock reference) has kept improving, although …
Read More »Faster than faster: Optane 800p
Last year Intel, 2017, announced a memory based on a new technology, 3D XPoint (read 3D crosspoint), providing a faster, cheaper solution than NAND. Non volatile as DRAM (it does not lose its content when power is off) it seemed as a good replacement for NAND but not for DRAM. …
Read More »2 years worth of movies in your pocket
Roughly two years after having developed SSD (Solid State Drive) storage in a size format that is similar to a cigarette box (a bit thinner, actually) with a capacity of 15.36TB, Samsung is now delivering in the same size 30.72TB, a huge storage capacity that would let you store 2 …
Read More »The race to more storage capacity is still on
I haven’t been posted for quite a while news on the evolution of storage performance. Moore’s law has come to a halt in 2015 in terms of economic squeezing of cost per transistor but industry kept working on improving storage media under the pressure of end users demand. The shift …
Read More »Going down to femtoseconds and picoseconds
DRAM chips, the ones in your laptop storing bits using capacitors inside a chip, are pretty good in terms of speed. They have a switching time in the order of 2 nanoseconds, that it the time it takes a beam of light to cover 60cm. And, remember, light travels really …
Read More »A never ending decrease of technology cost
In the last century we have seen an amazing increase of affordability of a wide variety of goods, including food (we can have today what used to be premium food at very low price, when I was young salmon was expensive, now it is quite affordable, fruits like mango and …
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